There was a student who pulled a similar stunt at my school, but it didn't go anywhere. Just as the previous post suggests, a new one was selected--the one who got the next most votes.
And what's up with the Homecoming activities? We had T-shirt and Hat day. So I wore a "hat" no one could see (for reasons of decency) and there were many things written on my shirt that were in poor taste. I was selected as Winner of T-Shirt day, but since I didn't go to the Homecoming Awards ceremony, I was denied the prize that I should have received. The teachers considered that to be sufficient punishment for my actions.
IMHO, the only differences here are the contest, and the drama. If he didn't even show up, what would have been the difference?
I punched the German into Babelfish before I read the article.Hmm.
Babelfish: an open operating system does not only have predivide LinuxToday: "An open operating system does not just have advantages"
Babelfish: An open operating system can mutate mail. With Windows 2000 however there are all services and services from a hand. That thus really saves time and for cash. More information under www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000 LinuxToday: "An open operating system sometimes just mutates. Instead Windows 2000 offers all services from a single source. This saves time and consequently really money. More info under www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000"
Babelfish implies that Linux can mutate your mail? Where's this thing about advantages? I don't see the word advantages anywhere in the babelfish translation.... Hrmph. Sounds like propagandizing from LinuxToday to me.
But I still agree, the changes to the penguin make it a direct attack on Linux. I'm just surprised they didn't make it a little more accurate and put the BSD daemon's head on Tux, instead of a frog head... IMHO it would have been more accurate, since the linux sources often comment about stuff that was a direct port of BSD code...
I also need to make a mention of something else. Bringing the GUI and ease-of-use to the world also make it easier to make errors.
Making errors in cars often results in accidents, often causes serious injury. That's why we give Driver's Ed courses to drivers before they can drive. They need to know how to use it, they don't just hop in and play around with it.
But with computers, no license is required. It's all to often presumed that online, anonymity is provided, so no damage can really come to anyone, no consequences are to be suffered for making mistakes. And with no consequences, malicious behavior is far more common. If I DoS your computer, usually nothing will be done to me, because you don't know who I am, so you can't do anything about it!
There's an interesting point: Why don't we require a license to operate a computer? Why don't we impose strict rules and identification systems in all areas worldwide, to ensure that they are used intelligently and responsibly? That might help this whole problem as well. If people are afraid of being retaliated upon, paying fines/damages/restitutions, or serving jail time for serious offenses and mistakes, maybe we'd be more interested in doing what we're supposed to, maybe we'd care about learning how to use them, and use them responsibly!
Some ease of use is required though; Most people would not be able to drive a vehicle if they had to squeeze a clamp to stop, turn a lever on the motor to control motor speed and acceleration, shift gears by pushing the right gears together in the transmission, or steer by trying to turn both front wheels evenly with your hands. In fact, it'd be downright dangerous to try it!
But worrying about the GUI and making it easy-to-use is like worrying about manipulating the radio or environment controls, just doing things to make the driver and passengers happier. The car will still get you from one place to another even if you have to sit on a board, have no radio, and the heater and air conditioner don't work. A car like that might be a bit like using some program designed in COBOL--it'll do the job, but you probably won't enjoy using it too much. And you'll have to learn how to use it, it isn't second nature the first time you look at it.
Long and short of it is, a computer is still usable without a GUI, you just have to learn how. The great calamity is that many people don't care or want to learn how to use them that way, and still they think that they should be able to use a computer, preferably without learning too much. And it's the programmer's responsibility to make sure they can. So is it the engineer's fault that a car weighs so much and doesn't pass fluidly through anything it hits, and that a child can't drive? Hardly. So why should it be the programmer's fault if a user has to learn a little to use a computer?
> Ditch ease of use, and get all the lusers off computers around the globe. Technology will increase, and the cumulative IQ of computer users everywhere will skyrocket.
> I hope that you are being sarcastic. Do you really expect companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Electronic Arts to simply ditch their profitable businesses to get rid of "Lusers"?
I was entirely serious. Unfortunately, a vicious cycle has developed. The heads of these large companies in many cases were once business majors, and in general the business majors don't carry much of an interest in computing. However, they do have an interest in the bottom line, and there's money to be made in computers. So they managed to make it into the system, and they're not leaving. So it's to be expected that this cycle will continue.:(
I'm waiting for the day that everyone has Internet appliances and no longer use "computers" per se, so the businesses decide there's no money to be had making it easy for the private user anymore, so those of us that use "real" computers can get some real work done.
Give me vi and a compiler, and I'll get something done. That is my creed. I will produce something to solve any given problem, as that is my purpose. I am a programmer, and I want to do some real work, I don't like sitting around designing things that look pretty so some newbie can learn it without the hassle I went through. Computers were designed to speed things up, not to make it easier, not to make it easr to screw up. That's our job as human beings, to make the mistakes.
> Linux doesn't do shit for you, neither does Windows or Mac OS.
I disagree. The OS is a key function to the way the system works. Ask someone who used punch cards, and had little or no OS to work on. They couldn't use a save function, they had to know all about the hardware. This slows development horribly.
> bitchx lets you pretend you're a 3l337 hax0r on an IRC network
And what is to be gained by doing this? BitchX is bloatware. While I do use an IRC client for convenience, I feel that a user who can't use a mere telnet client shouldn't be chatting. This would also limit the conversations, as the collective interest of the group members would indeed be different. We wouldn't have much for trolls, chatters who only want to engage in meaningless conversation, or people who know little about the system but look only for a cheap way to talk to friends or look for emotional support.
> would you need to know how the fuel injection or coolant system worked in order to drive it?
You have a point here. But cars are an entirely different medium, in today's world it would be hard to make a decent living without a car. The same could be said of computers, but it doesn't have to be that way. Cars also don't generally "break" as often, and people who know little about them don't complain that their car makes them not feel as good about themselves as it could. This is a common rant among "lusers" who simply don't like the way their computer is set up.
The fact remains, if you don't want to use a car, you don't have much for alternatives. But there are many many many other options to a computer. If you need Internet access, you can use an Internet appliance. Papers can be done on typewriters. Spreadsheets can be done on ledgers. You don't have quite the efficiency, but you do have the option of using these other tools instead.
And as an FYI, I am 21. I have a car, a 1985 Buick Century. And I do some work on it myself. The engine is a puzzling thing, but it is interesting and I do pay attention to it. I do know how to maintain my car, and it almost never sees a shop.
>AOL will change their "authentication" checks again.
And what happens when loading a banner once every 5 minutes or so becomes part of the authentication?
The 3rd party clients will have to load the banners, and AOL will get their money. But it would be up to the implementer if they want to *display* the banner they loaded, or filter it to/dev/null.
So long as the auth protocol doesn't require that a user *click* on a banner periodically, this could be a semi-workable solution. AOL gets their money, linux users have a non-AOL client that doesn't show the banners and still allows IM functions, and everyone is happy. Right???
This seems to be a common malady throughout our fair State. Most everywhere I go, the watertowers look mostly the same, aside from the choice of the 4 support legs vs one hulking pipe directly beneath the tower. Somewhere in the area of Dike and Steamboat Rock, there is a town with an interesting tower indeed--it looks more like an alien ship!
The design of these antennas sounds interesting... But not too far removed from that of the out-of-town cable service called EverTech. Hmm...
Here in Iowa, there are pitifully few Internet solutions.
We cows and corn are actually quite literate, and are quite aggravated at the lack of decent Internet service.
Sure, there's AOL, but AOL incurs long-distance charges unless you live near one of the state's 3 big Universities or in Des Moines.
Small ISPs are slowly cropping up (I couldn't get Internet access until mid 1995), but the max transfer rates in most areas tend to cap out at 28.8k.
Other solutions would include SkyLink, a service which allowed free (one-way) downloading of data through large TVRO dishes, but only if you leave the dish on a certain channel (G4-6 last I knew) and only at 9600bps.And you were restricted to what they felt like sending you; you never sent any data back to them. The same company offered Planet Connect, which cost over $1000 initially and around $40 a month to maintain, as I recall. However, that supposedly allowed data transfer speeds of up to 230k/second.
I vaguely recall reading about another service which would allow (for similar rates to Planet Connect) you to use your ISP to send data out over the internet, but receive data asynchronously via a small Ku-band satellite dish at around 1Mb/sec. I don't know for sure how accurate this information is though; it was about 3yrs ago I read up on this, so some of these outfits may have folded.
I wish I could remember the name of the outfit in Waverly, Iowa. That one deserves an honorable mention since it's a wireless ISP. I don't recall the details of the setup, but I do remember that it's more or less this one guy's hobby, and that since he never received a degree in EE, it makes it all the more impressive.
>Personally, I don't know why the cows and corn would be on the Internet?
Yes, it saddens me to realize how much of the world thinks there's nothing west of Chicago, until you hit Vegas. It's the barren wasteland of the US, right?;p Actually, here in Iowa, we do have some of the most fertile soil in the US, perhaps even the world, because of glaciers from the North Pole that slid down, carrying valuable topsoil from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada, and finally depositing it here before finally melting away.
Well, at least that's what my father says. He's the farmer, I'm the computer geek who rarely sees the light of day.;p
Coming from a guy who grew up with the PC architecture, and learned DOS by the time I was 11, I might be a little biased, but I see it like this:
The GUI can be considered like clothes, or the icing on the cake. In almost all situations (Macs excluded) the GUI is not required to use the system. This philosophy seems to now be going the way of the dodo ( thank you, uncle Bill) but it was once quite true, and it still is, at least for a little while longer.
So with the GUI as the clothes,
the central OS can be considered the skin,
and programming anything with moderate complexity requires knowledge of the anatomy at the skin level or below.
The sad thing is, a great many new users will go into a store, see the computer's flashy clothes, and then by it, as if it were all a fashion contest. And so, that's how the BigCompaniesTM will set them up--give it the prettiest clothes they can.
But that has little value when it comes to actually using the computer for things more interesting than writing a paper, checking email, or webbrowsing.
It just sickens me to see how the cycle is propogated. Newbies buy easy to use Windows boxes, and their kids become script kiddies and chat junkies, but all too often don't learn about the computers' internals, or how it really works. They can move and click a mouse, and that's all that really matters...right?
I distinctly recall a kid who tried to tell me he was a 1337 hax0r, and then tried to con me into passing him all my registered software. Less than a week later, he came to me to say that his sister had acquired a computer and he couldn't configure it to dial into our local ISP. When asked why, he said, "My sister dropped the mouse, so it didn't work!" Since when is the mouse required to configure a computer for Internet access?
I was fortunate, I guess, because some Great White Guru came down and divined into my brain the knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts. But should that not be common knowledge?
Making things easy to use (RedHat Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc) is a really bad way to do things.
Here at a state university, I frequently watch people as they use computers to whatever serves their purposes. And what do I see?
LEGIONS, dozens, nay, *hundreds* of students, who use these computers only to do what they absolutely have to, who use the computers strictly to surf porn, chat, and do email. It sickens me to watch as these students never learn to do more, and they use the non-SSL webCGI to do their email, because it's pretty and "easy to use."
These people are the ones that just close the browser instead of clicking the "logout" button, leave ICQ registered to them and save their password, leave 1-click shopping turned on at Amazon (in a public lab) and often walk away and forget to logout of the terminal, because "I don't have to do that on the one in my room!"
Sure, "easy to use" interfaces cause the mainstream public to flock to computers, but these people never do learn to do more with a computer than these simple operations.
I've watched students go through year after year, advancing from Freshman to Senior status, and not growing in computer proficiency.
Another common theme among this class of students are the ones who use the lab to type up papers, because the professor requires them to be typed. However, looking through the menus for that spell checker option seems to laborsome; I have grown tired of counting how many college level (COLLEGE LEVEL!!!!) students typing up papers with the reading proficiency of a third grade student. And I'm in Iowa, the state where we're told we have the highest literary rates, the smartest kids, and the best schools!
To steal a term from alt.sysadmin.recovery, these interfaces spawn thousands of Lusers, not users, not students who are truly interested in computers.
Maybe I'm a bit harsh, considering my first computer booted into BASIC and would do little or nothing without learning how to program it, and assembly quickly became second nature to me. But it wouldn't have, if that computer had a hard disk loaded with windows 98!
If you ditch ease of use, you can focus on other goals, such as security, speed, and flexibility. These parts are far more important than catering to the masses who have little interest in learning to use the tool they have.
If we developed knives that would cut things for the chef automatically, would he learn to use the knife manually? Probably not. If we made hammers that only needed to hang from a wall and would drive in all the nails, would the carpenter learn how to use the hammer? No.
Likewise, making computers easy to use lures not the truly interested people, it only gets the slightly curious-but-don't-really-give-a-damn people onboard.
Computers should, by their nature, be somewhat difficult to use. This will get the lusers out of the industry, and the students who are flocking to become CS students that are motivated solely by money out. In the end, ditching ease of use will save us.
Let's face it, there are some people who simply should not be using a computer, much less programming one! Yes, people can learn, but take your average Business or Elementary Education major, give them a one-semester course on Visual Basic, and watch them develop some truly nasty stuff.
We had a Business Major get a job in the ITS dept because it happened to be one of the better-paying student jobs, and he developed this horrible VB app that propogated throughout the labs as our method for authenticating users (on win95.) And what was the result? No encryption, local lists containing thousands of SSNs on publically-accessible network volumes, a program that segfaulted often and lost students' work when they had to reboot, and open network ports that permitted any user to capture any other users' SSNs. Computers which were virtually unusable because the Ctrl, Alt, and windows keys were disabled.
And don't forget, just removing the vbrun*.dll file would completely circumvent the security completely!
Stupidity breeds stupidity. Mobs are generally panicky and stupid in the first place, and going "easy to use" only makes the lives of the CS/ITS people (who can DO something with a computer) more difficult and troblesome.
Ditch ease of use, and get all the lusers off computers around the globe. Technology will increase, and the cumulative IQ of computer users everywhere will skyrocket.
I grew up in a Christian home, with 2 very strong believing parents.I however, was quite skeptical of the whole religious thing, but went back and forth. My parents made me give away a copy of Dungeons and Dragons my brother gave me; I only saw it as a mere computer game. In high school I was seen as a religious fanatic/soul winner for a while, but I grew tired of it quickly. I quit going to church, I quit reading the bible, I even got growly when my parents watched a preacher on Sunday morning.
And then I got to college. Immediately I claimed agnosticism, but then I met up with a guy who was reading a bible in class, and he tried to drag me back to my parents' beliefs again.
Don't go flaming me yet, because my story is only beginning...
I met the first girl I ever fell in love with, and she sat there and turned my world upside down. She claimed to believe in Ancient Irish Spiritualism when I met her, but through her I met a couple Wiccans. I borrowed and read a book on Wicca, and found I agreed with many of the points in the text. However, it just wasn't quite right for me...
My would-be girlfriend had weird way of reading my mind and finishing my sentences, and told me all about reincarnation and how she was supposedly able to 'split' her soul and jump into other people--she claimed to have been my mother in a previous life and to have saved my life in a motorcycle accident before I'd even met her in this life.
Before she and I went on with our own lives, she'd given me a crash course in Spiritualism, Wicca, Earthism, and Paganism in general. After the breakup, I had a time where I considered becoming Catholic, but decided against it as well.
Now, I don't really know of a religion that describes what I believe, but here is brief list of what I do believe...
I believe in reincarnation.
I believe that all things are connected, and you meet up with the same people in different lives.
There is no Hell, but there is some "higher" plane of sorts to go to, after several lives on earth.
There are 4 types of people: 1) No soul; 2) Have a soul and spirit, but just go through life, and are here to learn as much as we can, and eventually move on; We don't remember our previous lives. 3) Have a soul&spirit, but do remember previous lives, and can tell people about them; 4) Just a soul this type never live on Earth, but "manage" the higher plane.
Type 3s watch over the type 2s, 2s don't watch anyone else, but are connected to others and can feel/sense those they're connected to (but often don't), type 1s live for one lifetime and die, never to return.
Upon dying, returning to the Earth as quickly as possible is good--we are for creamation. Even type 2s can "know" things without being told, in a psychic-like fashion (I can predict the weather with >95% accuracy, and know what my current g/f is feeling, as well as how my family is doing and how some of my friends are, even if we don't talk for weeks/months and are hundreds of miles apart--they can never escape whatever higher power there is.)
A person can lose their "psychic/clairvoyant" abilities, or can shield themselves from having others connect with them and read their thoughts.
People should not be trying to advocate/dupe others into their religion, everyone should figure out for themselves what they believe.
I don't prescribe to any religion that I'm aware of, what I believe is a juxtoposition of all the religions I've been exposed to, so I don't know a specific name for it.
If anyone wants to know more about my beliefs, just post a reply to ask, and I'll be happy to tell you more.
We really should give Windows some credit. It is, after all, a significant part of why so many computers are in use today. If the GUI were never invented, if everyone still edited documents with EDLIN and wrote assembly in debug, the computer industry would never be what it is today.
The www would probably not exist in the form most people acknowledge it (I'm not talking about computer gurus, I mean the average joe who would be scared to tears at the thought of spending countless hours using something like lynx or Gopher to browse) and we UNIX users might not yet even have something like X.
And like it or not, Windows did bring computers into the home faster than any other single product, so it does deserve some respect--even if we do hate it now.
And I still have 2 boxes in my room, one running win3.0, and one running 3.1. Sure, the only reason I use the 3.0 box is for reading old 5 1/4" floppies, and the 3.1 box is mainly used as a terminal in a pinch, but they are here and they still work. They survived Y2k, and they're still chugging along happily. I just wish I could say that for my copies (beta and release) of win95!;p
Modified opening screens were quite common around 1993-1994 from companies like Packard Bell or Compaq in Windows 3.1.
I've seen them modified in 95 and 98 as well,
but AFAIK they were all 320x240 resolution. Think they were actually BMP format in win9x though.:)
But I've never seen anyone with the gall to modify the NT4 startup banner. Anyone up for a challenge?
I put a copy of windows 3.1 on a 20meg hard disk in a 286, then swapped it out to an old Tandy 1000 (also a 286, but with an 8bit bus and no support for XMS.)
When that wouldn't work, I sprung for windows 3.0 for my 1000, and installed it in somewhere between 2 and 4 megs of HD space. (My copy came on 4 720k floppies.)
Win3.0 was nice in that it would run in CGA and in under 640k.
And I think it goes without saying, but I wouldn't DREAM of trying a win98 install on there--even if I could find a 100-200MB drive for that old machine!;p
IBM had best not release it calling it a "Smart Watch." That name was taken about 15 years ago, by Tandy, for the add-on chip which provided the Tandy 1000 series with a clock which did not need to be reset on each bootup. Much like the CMOS chip does for most semi-modern computers of today.
c) that I have not read one post indicating the one thing that I found so aggravating about this article.
What? A central repository that keeps track of what systems all over the Internet is running? I know, in theory it sounds like a good idea (support the most common stuff first) but did anyone else hear a Big Brother reference, or was it just me???
Slashdot Mirror
And what's up with the Homecoming activities? We had T-shirt and Hat day. So I wore a "hat" no one could see (for reasons of decency) and there were many things written on my shirt that were in poor taste. I was selected as Winner of T-Shirt day, but since I didn't go to the Homecoming Awards ceremony, I was denied the prize that I should have received. The teachers considered that to be sufficient punishment for my actions.
IMHO, the only differences here are the contest, and the drama. If he didn't even show up, what would have been the difference?
Babelfish: an open operating system does not only have predivide
LinuxToday: "An open operating system does not just have advantages"
Babelfish: An open operating system can mutate mail. With Windows 2000 however there are all services and services from a hand. That thus really saves time and for cash. More information under www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000
LinuxToday: "An open operating system sometimes just mutates. Instead Windows 2000 offers all services from a single source. This saves time and consequently really money. More info under www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000"
Babelfish implies that Linux can mutate your mail? Where's this thing about advantages? I don't see the word advantages anywhere in the babelfish translation.... Hrmph. Sounds like propagandizing from LinuxToday to me.
But I still agree, the changes to the penguin make it a direct attack on Linux.
I'm just surprised they didn't make it a little more accurate and put the BSD daemon's head on Tux, instead of a frog head... IMHO it would have been more accurate, since the linux sources often comment about stuff that was a direct port of BSD code...
Making errors in cars often results in accidents, often causes serious injury. That's why we give Driver's Ed courses to drivers before they can drive. They need to know how to use it, they don't just hop in and play around with it.
But with computers, no license is required. It's all to often presumed that online, anonymity is provided, so no damage can really come to anyone, no consequences are to be suffered for making mistakes. And with no consequences, malicious behavior is far more common. If I DoS your computer, usually nothing will be done to me, because you don't know who I am, so you can't do anything about it!
There's an interesting point: Why don't we require a license to operate a computer? Why don't we impose strict rules and identification systems in all areas worldwide, to ensure that they are used intelligently and responsibly? That might help this whole problem as well. If people are afraid of being retaliated upon, paying fines/damages/restitutions, or serving jail time for serious offenses and mistakes, maybe we'd be more interested in doing what we're supposed to, maybe we'd care about learning how to use them, and use them responsibly!
Some ease of use is required though; Most people would not be able to drive a vehicle if they had to squeeze a clamp to stop, turn a lever on the motor to control motor speed and acceleration, shift gears by pushing the right gears together in the transmission, or steer by trying to turn both front wheels evenly with your hands. In fact, it'd be downright dangerous to try it!
But worrying about the GUI and making it easy-to-use is like worrying about manipulating the radio or environment controls, just doing things to make the driver and passengers happier. The car will still get you from one place to another even if you have to sit on a board, have no radio, and the heater and air conditioner don't work. A car like that might be a bit like using some program designed in COBOL--it'll do the job, but you probably won't enjoy using it too much. And you'll have to learn how to use it, it isn't second nature the first time you look at it.
Long and short of it is, a computer is still usable without a GUI, you just have to learn how. The great calamity is that many people don't care or want to learn how to use them that way, and still they think that they should be able to use a computer, preferably without learning too much. And it's the programmer's responsibility to make sure they can. So is it the engineer's fault that a car weighs so much and doesn't pass fluidly through anything it hits, and that a child can't drive? Hardly. So why should it be the programmer's fault if a user has to learn a little to use a computer?
> I hope that you are being sarcastic. Do you really expect companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Electronic Arts to simply ditch their profitable businesses to get rid of "Lusers"?
I was entirely serious. Unfortunately, a vicious cycle has developed. The heads of these large companies in many cases were once business majors, and in general the business majors don't carry much of an interest in computing. However, they do have an interest in the bottom line, and there's money to be made in computers. So they managed to make it into the system, and they're not leaving. So it's to be expected that this cycle will continue. :(
I'm waiting for the day that everyone has Internet appliances and no longer use "computers" per se, so the businesses decide there's no money to be had making it easy for the private user anymore, so those of us that use "real" computers can get some real work done.
Give me vi and a compiler, and I'll get something done.
That is my creed. I will produce something to solve any given problem, as that is my purpose. I am a programmer, and I want to do some real work, I don't like sitting around designing things that look pretty so some newbie can learn it without the hassle I went through. Computers were designed to speed things up, not to make it easier, not to make it easr to screw up. That's our job as human beings, to make the mistakes.
I disagree. The OS is a key function to the way the system works. Ask someone who used punch cards, and had little or no OS to work on. They couldn't use a save function, they had to know all about the hardware. This slows development horribly.
> bitchx lets you pretend you're a 3l337 hax0r on an IRC network
And what is to be gained by doing this? BitchX is bloatware. While I do use an IRC client for convenience, I feel that a user who can't use a mere telnet client shouldn't be chatting. This would also limit the conversations, as the collective interest of the group members would indeed be different. We wouldn't have much for trolls, chatters who only want to engage in meaningless conversation, or people who know little about the system but look only for a cheap way to talk to friends or look for emotional support.
> would you need to know how the fuel injection or coolant system worked in order to drive it?
You have a point here. But cars are an entirely different medium, in today's world it would be hard to make a decent living without a car. The same could be said of computers, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Cars also don't generally "break" as often, and people who know little about them don't complain that their car makes them not feel as good about themselves as it could. This is a common rant among "lusers" who simply don't like the way their computer is set up.
The fact remains, if you don't want to use a car, you don't have much for alternatives. But there are many many many other options to a computer. If you need Internet access, you can use an Internet appliance. Papers can be done on typewriters. Spreadsheets can be done on ledgers. You don't have quite the efficiency, but you do have the option of using these other tools instead. And as an FYI, I am 21. I have a car, a 1985 Buick Century. And I do some work on it myself. The engine is a puzzling thing, but it is interesting and I do pay attention to it. I do know how to maintain my car, and it almost never sees a shop.
And what happens when loading a banner once every 5 minutes or so becomes part of the authentication? /dev/null.
The 3rd party clients will have to load the banners, and AOL will get their money. But it would be up to the implementer if they want to *display* the banner they loaded, or filter it to
So long as the auth protocol doesn't require that a user *click* on a banner periodically, this could be a semi-workable solution. AOL gets their money, linux users have a non-AOL client that doesn't show the banners and still allows IM functions, and everyone is happy. Right???
Somewhere in the area of Dike and Steamboat Rock, there is a town with an interesting tower indeed--it looks more like an alien ship!
The design of these antennas sounds interesting... But not too far removed from that of the out-of-town cable service called EverTech. Hmm...
We cows and corn are actually quite literate, and are quite aggravated at the lack of decent Internet service.
Sure, there's AOL, but AOL incurs long-distance charges unless you live near one of the state's 3 big Universities or in Des Moines.
Small ISPs are slowly cropping up (I couldn't get Internet access until mid 1995), but the max transfer rates in most areas tend to cap out at 28.8k.
Other solutions would include SkyLink, a service which allowed free (one-way) downloading of data through large TVRO dishes, but only if you leave the dish on a certain channel (G4-6 last I knew) and only at 9600bps.And you were restricted to what they felt like sending you; you never sent any data back to them.
The same company offered Planet Connect, which cost over $1000 initially and around $40 a month to maintain, as I recall. However, that supposedly allowed data transfer speeds of up to 230k/second.
I vaguely recall reading about another service which would allow (for similar rates to Planet Connect) you to use your ISP to send data out over the internet, but receive data asynchronously via a small Ku-band satellite dish at around 1Mb/sec. I don't know for sure how accurate this information is though; it was about 3yrs ago I read up on this, so some of these outfits may have folded.
I wish I could remember the name of the outfit in Waverly, Iowa. That one deserves an honorable mention since it's a wireless ISP. I don't recall the details of the setup, but I do remember that it's more or less this one guy's hobby, and that since he never received a degree in EE, it makes it all the more impressive.
Yes, it saddens me to realize how much of the world thinks there's nothing west of Chicago, until you hit Vegas. It's the barren wasteland of the US, right? ;p ;p
Actually, here in Iowa, we do have some of the most fertile soil in the US, perhaps even the world, because of glaciers from the North Pole that slid down, carrying valuable topsoil from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada, and finally depositing it here before finally melting away.
Well, at least that's what my father says. He's the farmer, I'm the computer geek who rarely sees the light of day.
The GUI can be considered like clothes, or the icing on the cake. In almost all situations (Macs excluded) the GUI is not required to use the system. This philosophy seems to now be going the way of the dodo ( thank you, uncle Bill) but it was once quite true, and it still is, at least for a little while longer.
So with the GUI as the clothes,
the central OS can be considered the skin,
and programming anything with moderate complexity requires knowledge of the anatomy at the skin level or below.
The sad thing is, a great many new users will go into a store, see the computer's flashy clothes, and then by it, as if it were all a fashion contest.
And so, that's how the BigCompaniesTM will set them up--give it the prettiest clothes they can.
But that has little value when it comes to actually using the computer for things more interesting than writing a paper, checking email, or webbrowsing.
It just sickens me to see how the cycle is propogated. Newbies buy easy to use Windows boxes, and their kids become script kiddies and chat junkies, but all too often don't learn about the computers' internals, or how it really works.
They can move and click a mouse, and that's all that really matters...right?
I distinctly recall a kid who tried to tell me he was a 1337 hax0r, and then tried to con me into passing him all my registered software. Less than a week later, he came to me to say that his sister had acquired a computer and he couldn't configure it to dial into our local ISP. When asked why, he said, "My sister dropped the mouse, so it didn't work!"
Since when is the mouse required to configure a computer for Internet access?
I was fortunate, I guess, because some Great White Guru came down and divined into my brain the knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts.
But should that not be common knowledge?
Here at a state university, I frequently watch people as they use computers to whatever serves their purposes. And what do I see?
LEGIONS, dozens, nay, *hundreds* of students, who use these computers only to do what they absolutely have to, who use the computers strictly to surf porn, chat, and do email.
It sickens me to watch as these students never learn to do more, and they use the non-SSL webCGI to do their email, because it's pretty and "easy to use."
These people are the ones that just close the browser instead of clicking the "logout" button, leave ICQ registered to them and save their password, leave 1-click shopping turned on at Amazon (in a public lab) and often walk away and forget to logout of the terminal, because "I don't have to do that on the one in my room!"
Sure, "easy to use" interfaces cause the mainstream public to flock to computers, but these people never do learn to do more with a computer than these simple operations.
I've watched students go through year after year, advancing from Freshman to Senior status, and not growing in computer proficiency.
Another common theme among this class of students are the ones who use the lab to type up papers, because the professor requires them to be typed. However, looking through the menus for that spell checker option seems to laborsome; I have grown tired of counting how many college level (COLLEGE LEVEL!!!!) students typing up papers with the reading proficiency of a third grade student.
And I'm in Iowa, the state where we're told we have the highest literary rates, the smartest kids, and the best schools!
To steal a term from alt.sysadmin.recovery, these interfaces spawn thousands of Lusers, not users, not students who are truly interested in computers.
Maybe I'm a bit harsh, considering my first computer booted into BASIC and would do little or nothing without learning how to program it, and assembly quickly became second nature to me. But it wouldn't have, if that computer had a hard disk loaded with windows 98!
If you ditch ease of use, you can focus on other goals, such as security, speed, and flexibility. These parts are far more important than catering to the masses who have little interest in learning to use the tool they have.
If we developed knives that would cut things for the chef automatically, would he learn to use the knife manually? Probably not.
If we made hammers that only needed to hang from a wall and would drive in all the nails, would the carpenter learn how to use the hammer? No.
Likewise, making computers easy to use lures not the truly interested people, it only gets the slightly curious-but-don't-really-give-a-damn people onboard.
Computers should, by their nature, be somewhat difficult to use. This will get the lusers out of the industry, and the students who are flocking to become CS students that are motivated solely by money out. In the end, ditching ease of use will save us.
Let's face it, there are some people who simply should not be using a computer, much less programming one!
Yes, people can learn, but take your average Business or Elementary Education major, give them a one-semester course on Visual Basic, and watch them develop some truly nasty stuff.
We had a Business Major get a job in the ITS dept because it happened to be one of the better-paying student jobs, and he developed this horrible VB app that propogated throughout the labs as our method for authenticating users (on win95.)
And what was the result? No encryption, local lists containing thousands of SSNs on publically-accessible network volumes, a program that segfaulted often and lost students' work when they had to reboot, and open network ports that permitted any user to capture any other users' SSNs. Computers which were virtually unusable because the Ctrl, Alt, and windows keys were disabled.
And don't forget, just removing the vbrun*.dll file would completely circumvent the security completely!
Stupidity breeds stupidity. Mobs are generally panicky and stupid in the first place, and going "easy to use" only makes the lives of the CS/ITS people (who can DO something with a computer) more difficult and troblesome.
Ditch ease of use, and get all the lusers off computers around the globe. Technology will increase, and the cumulative IQ of computer users everywhere will skyrocket.
In high school I was seen as a religious fanatic/soul winner for a while, but I grew tired of it quickly. I quit going to church, I quit reading the bible, I even got growly when my parents watched a preacher on Sunday morning.
And then I got to college. Immediately I claimed agnosticism, but then I met up with a guy who was reading a bible in class, and he tried to drag me back to my parents' beliefs again.
Don't go flaming me yet, because my story is only beginning...
I met the first girl I ever fell in love with, and she sat there and turned my world upside down. She claimed to believe in Ancient Irish Spiritualism when I met her, but through her I met a couple Wiccans. I borrowed and read a book on Wicca, and found I agreed with many of the points in the text. However, it just wasn't quite right for me...
My would-be girlfriend had weird way of reading my mind and finishing my sentences, and told me all about reincarnation and how she was supposedly able to 'split' her soul and jump into other people--she claimed to have been my mother in a previous life and to have saved my life in a motorcycle accident before I'd even met her in this life.
Before she and I went on with our own lives, she'd given me a crash course in Spiritualism, Wicca, Earthism, and Paganism in general.
After the breakup, I had a time where I considered becoming Catholic, but decided against it as well.
Now, I don't really know of a religion that describes what I believe, but here is brief list of what I do believe...
I believe in reincarnation.
I believe that all things are connected, and you meet up with the same people in different lives.
There is no Hell, but there is some "higher" plane of sorts to go to, after several lives on earth.
There are 4 types of people:
1) No soul;
2) Have a soul and spirit, but just go through life, and are here to learn as much as we can, and eventually move on; We don't remember our previous lives.
3) Have a soul&spirit, but do remember previous lives, and can tell people about them;
4) Just a soul this type never live on Earth, but "manage" the higher plane.
Type 3s watch over the type 2s, 2s don't watch anyone else, but are connected to others and can feel/sense those they're connected to (but often don't), type 1s live for one lifetime and die, never to return.
Upon dying, returning to the Earth as quickly as possible is good--we are for creamation.
Even type 2s can "know" things without being told, in a psychic-like fashion (I can predict the weather with >95% accuracy, and know what my current g/f is feeling, as well as how my family is doing and how some of my friends are, even if we don't talk for weeks/months and are hundreds of miles apart--they can never escape whatever higher power there is.)
A person can lose their "psychic/clairvoyant" abilities, or can shield themselves from having others connect with them and read their thoughts.
People should not be trying to advocate/dupe others into their religion, everyone should figure out for themselves what they believe.
I don't prescribe to any religion that I'm aware of, what I believe is a juxtoposition of all the religions I've been exposed to, so I don't know a specific name for it.
If anyone wants to know more about my beliefs, just post a reply to ask, and I'll be happy to tell you more.
The www would probably not exist in the form most people acknowledge it (I'm not talking about computer gurus, I mean the average joe who would be scared to tears at the thought of spending countless hours using something like lynx or Gopher to browse) and we UNIX users might not yet even have something like X.
And like it or not, Windows did bring computers into the home faster than any other single product, so it does deserve some respect--even if we do hate it now.
And I still have 2 boxes in my room, one running win3.0, and one running 3.1. Sure, the only reason I use the 3.0 box is for reading old 5 1/4" floppies, and the 3.1 box is mainly used as a terminal in a pinch, but they are here and they still work. They survived Y2k, and they're still chugging along happily. ;p
I just wish I could say that for my copies (beta and release) of win95!
Modified opening screens were quite common around 1993-1994 from companies like Packard Bell or Compaq in Windows 3.1. :)
I've seen them modified in 95 and 98 as well, but AFAIK they were all 320x240 resolution. Think they were actually BMP format in win9x though.
But I've never seen anyone with the gall to modify the NT4 startup banner. Anyone up for a challenge?
When that wouldn't work, I sprung for windows 3.0 for my 1000, and installed it in somewhere between 2 and 4 megs of HD space. (My copy came on 4 720k floppies.)
Win3.0 was nice in that it would run in CGA and in under 640k.
And I think it goes without saying, but I wouldn't DREAM of trying a win98 install on there--even if I could find a 100-200MB drive for that old machine! ;p
IBM had best not release it calling it a "Smart Watch." That name was taken about 15 years ago, by Tandy, for the add-on chip which provided the Tandy 1000 series with a clock which did not need to be reset on each bootup. Much like the CMOS chip does for most semi-modern computers of today.
a) that Love made the proprietary comment,
b) that we're bickering about it so much, and
c) that I have not read one post indicating the one thing that I found so aggravating about this article.
What? A central repository that keeps track of what systems all over the Internet is running? I know, in theory it sounds like a good idea (support the most common stuff first) but did anyone else hear a Big Brother reference, or was it just me???